Korean Fighting Kite

These are simple connectors for building your own Korean fighting kite.

My son needed to build one for his project on Asia so I designed and printed out corner connectors, t-connectors, and a central connector with my Cupcake.

I went with this design for our kite:

http://www.kiteplans.org/planos/coreen/coreen.html

You will need to use Google Translate to translate the page from French to English. One thing that I did was up-scale the dimensions of the kit a bit so that they're slightly larger than the metric-to-english conversion on the above design.

There are similar designs on http://www.kiteplans.org/pln_1564/ as well.

Instructions

Print out the kite-connectors-plate.stl (prints a spare corner and t-connector for you). It'll just fit on a Makerbot build platform. If you want to print each part separately (or need a spare) you'll need to print 1 kite-center-connector.stl, 4 kit-corner.stl, and 4 kite-t-connector.stl.

You will also need enough 1/8" dowel rod for the following:

3 - 13" lengths (horizontal supports)

3 - 18" lengths (vertical supports)

2 - 22" lengths (diagonal supports)

I just used an exacto knife to cut the dowel rod to length. Also the holes were a bit tight (which I liked for the corner pieces but not so much for the T-connectors). I drilled out the corner holes and the short vertical in the t-connector with a 1/8" bit to make the dowel rod slip in easier. I then used a 9/64" bit to ream out the horizontal holes in the t-connector and in the center connector holes so that it went all the way through so that the dowel rod would slide through easily.

Next, assemble it per the attached photo. Hot glue the corners and leave the center connector and the horizontal through-hole in the t-connectors unglued so that the kite can flex a bit.

We then cut a piece of thin white fabric ~2" wider and taller than the kite frame, decorated it, and then hot glued it around the perimeter of the frame. We then attached the kite string per the attached image.

I'll upload an image of the finished kite once we've completed it.

Category: Sport & Outdoors